Populism and Cultural Studies

Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures

19–21 November 2026
University of Würzburg

---

Call for Papers

‘Populism’ is omnipresent. In the Anglophone world, the frequency of the term’s use peaked around the Brexit vote and Trump’s first election (Herkman 2022; Paul et al. 2019), and the Cambridge Dictionary selected it as ‘Word of the Year’ for 2017. Almost a decade later, ‘populism’ still serves as a signature term for the climate of the present. In political debates and private conversations, on TV screens and in social media, in institutional debates and on the pages of popular and academic treatises, the term is played to capture a complex and volatile articulation of strategies and dispositions that apparently dominates moods and developments not only in the UK and the US, but also in Germany, Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and indeed all across the globe (Moffit 2020; Schiller 2018; Schwenck 2023). Once relegated to the margins, what we call ‘populism’ has moved to the centre not only of society and politics but also of culture and the arts. If populism professes to translate cultural dispositions into a political programmatic, then cultural studies is ideally poised for its critical examination. What is usually deemed to be at the heart of populist discourses is a binary opposition between the elite and ‘the people’, often couched as a rhetoric of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (McGuigan 1992; Kranert 2020). Populist discourses thus seem to press the necessity that ‘the people’ must come into their own, but it is unclear whether they are meant do so as political agent or political object.

BritCult 2026 addresses the need for systematic attention to the cultural roots, the cultural practices, and the cultural assumptions of populism, and possibly also the cultural acts and agendas necessary to wrestle with populist cultures past and present. Claiming to mobilize an integrated culture of ‘the people’ not only against impoverishment and elitism but also against cultural heterogeneity and dispersion, populism determinedly politicizes culture and culturalizes politics If you are interested in contributing a 20-minute paper, please send your abstract (c. 300 words) and a short bio-note (c. 150 words) by 15 April 2026 to anglistik-britcult2026@uni-wuerzburg.de.

---

Venue

Most conference events will be held in the Schelling-Forum Würzburg (Klinikstraße 3, 97070 Würzburg).

The keynote on the first evening will be held at Spitäle (Zeller Str. 1, 97082 Würzburg).

---

Postgraduate Forum

Information on the Postgraduate Forum 2026 will be made available shortly.

---

Keynotes

Juha Herkman (University of Helsinki)

The Unholy Union Between Populism and Cultural Studies: Questions of Normativity

Abstract

The etymological roots of both “populism” and “popular” trace back to the Latin term populus, meaning “the people.” Consequently, cultural studies, which focuses on the everyday experiences of ordinary life, are often intrinsically linked to a populist understanding of the significance of the people. In certain strands of cultural studies, the role of popular culture has even emerged as a political driving force, with a common interpretation of everyday popular practices as emancipatory actions. Within the critical tradition, a normative vision of equal and liberal development is ingrained in British cultural studies.

One notable approach to populism has been developed by discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who, in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe, formulated what is known as articulation theory. This theory seeks to explain the emergence of anti-hegemonic social movements. According to Laclau, in populism, a group of individuals comes together to articulate various social demands, thereby forging a political identity that serves as a counterforce to hegemonic power, while simultaneously constructing a perception of “the people” as the underdog against their adversaries. In this process, it is the various popular markers of everyday life that shape the demands and articulations, rather than underlying social structures.

For Laclau, populism represents a progressive approach, wherein leftist movements have historically challenged the conservative societal status quo and championed emancipatory social interests. However, as Mouffe has also pointed out, in the twenty-first century, regressive right-wing populism has managed to formulate its own articulations of popular identity. In the current political landscape, the close relationship between Laclau’s populism theory and British cultural studies brings to light critical questions of normativity in both fields.

Melanie M. Schiller (Radboud University)

Between Irony and Ideology: Music and the Popification of Far-Right Politics

Abstract

Contemporary populist far-right movements increasingly embrace a Gramscian conviction that politics is downstream from culture. While Antonio Gramsci developed his notion to explain the production and contestation of cultural hegemony, contemporary far-right actors have appropriated them as a strategy for metapolitical intervention. This paper examines how the far right advances this project through what I term the popification of politics: the translation of political ideology into the forms, affects, and aesthetics of popular culture. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aestheticization of politics, I explore how far-right actors increasingly operate through music and digital aesthetics. At the same time, contemporary digital culture is characterized by what Simon Reynolds calls retromania: a nostalgic fixation on recycled pasts and imagined futures. Combined with post-ironic sensibilities and the fluid subject positions associated with the emerging metamodernist structure of feeling, these conditions create fertile ground for new forms of populist cultural politics.

The paper investigates the popification of far-right politics through the interconnected aesthetic formations of retrowave, vaporwave, and fashwave music. I show how far-right cultural producers appropriate genres rooted in nostalgia and ironic ambiguity, infusing them with nativist imaginaries and reconstructive visions of the nation in what I call populist retromania. Focusing on the relationship between the US alt-right and the Swedish context, I trace how aesthetic and ideological repertoires travel across digital networks and acquire locally specific meanings.

By exploiting blurred boundaries between irony and sincerity, entertainment and ideology, these cultural forms function as powerful affective technologies. I argue that cultural studies is uniquely positioned to analyse how contemporary populism culturalizes politics and politicizes culture, contributing to far-right efforts to construct “the people,” mobilize affect, and pursue cultural hegemony in the digital age.

---

Accommodation

Hotels

We have blocked hotel rooms that you can book until 10 October using this link.

Hostels

You may also want to have a look at the Babelfish Hostel or the Würzburger Jugendherberge.

Restaurants

---

Contact

Organising team

• Zeno Ackermann, English Literature and British Cultural Studies
• Gesine Drews-Sylla, Slavic Studies
• Kirsten Sandrock, English Literature and British Cultural Studies
• MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, American Cultural Studies

email: anglistik-britcult2026@uni-wuerzburg.de

website: English & American Studies, University of Würzburg

Postal address

Lehrstuhl für Englische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
Neuphilologisches Institut
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg

---